It is common practice during the industrial production of goods such as a car to measure features and properties of its different components. These measurements can be carried out in special measurement cells by means of either contact or non contact measuring gauges, for example based on laser or photogrammetric principles. Such a procedure, for instance, is disclosed in DE 195 44 240 A1.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,672,500 discloses a method for monitoring and visualizing the output of a production process, whose output materials or objects are inspected by one or more inspection units. The inspection units scan or otherwise inspect each of a series of objects or material being produced by a production process and an image is generated representing each of the inspected objects, wherein differences between the objects and information on the entire process can be visually coded.
The purpose of such methods is to determine possible errors of the measured object after production. Disadvantageously though, in the measurement process, there can occur various additional errors, that prevent or complicate the determination of the errors of the object. This is especially the case if a high precision detection of errors is needed.
On the one hand, errors can occur in the positioning of the object during the measurement, and on the other hand, further errors can occur in the measurement of every single sensor that is used for measuring the object.
From the European patent application with the application number 12425140.6 a method and device for minimizing errors in the positioning of the measured object are known. The solution disclosed therein utilizes a reference positioning system (RPS) for placing and aligning objects, for instance a car body, on a support. However, the disclosed solution does not consider sensor-inherent errors.
The method disclosed in the European patent application with the application number 13005240.0 allows the compilation of spatial measuring data from various sources about a single object into a single output file. According to this document, spatial measuring data can be processed to transform and integrate the data into a common reference system to be able to compare the measuring data with CAD data and to display the results in a unified way.